Abstract
People are typically poor at telling apart truthful and deceptive statements. Based on the Unconscious Thought Theory, it has been suggested that poor lie detection arises from the intrinsic limitations of conscious thinking and can be improved by facilitating the contribution of unconscious thought (UT). In support of this hypothesis, Reinhard et al. (2013) observed improved lie detection among participants engaging in UT. The present study aimed to replicate this UT advantage using a similar experimental procedure but with an important improvement in a key control condition. Specifically, participants judged the truthfulness of eight video recordings in three thinking modes: immediately after watching them or after a period of unconscious or conscious deliberation. Results from two experiments (combined N = 226) failed to reveal a significant difference in lie detection accuracy between the thinking modes, even after efforts were made to facilitate the occurrence of an UT advantage in Experiment 2. The results imply that the UT advantage in deception detection is not a robust phenomenon.
Highlights
Humans regularly encounter and generate deception in their everyday social interactions, even though the act of lying is perceived as morally wrong by a society that values trustworthiness
The experiment found no significant difference in lie detection accuracies among unconscious thought (UT), conscious thought (CT), and immediate decision (ID) participants
Both experiments failed to observe any significant difference in lie detection accuracy across the three thinking modes
Summary
Humans regularly encounter and generate deception in their everyday social interactions, even though the act of lying is perceived as morally wrong by a society that values trustworthiness. To place the ubiquity of this phenomenon in perspective, DePaulo et al (1996) conducted an experiment where college students and community members recorded all their social interactions and all of the lies they told during those interactions every day for a week. By the end of the week, all participants recorded a total of 1,535 lies. For college students, this amounted to two lies per day or one lie in every three social interactions. This amounted to two lies per day or one lie in every three social interactions For community members, this meant one lie per day or one lie in every five social interactions. These findings led DePaulo et al (1996, p. 991) to conclude that “lying is a fact of daily life.” Results from other studies investigating the frequency of deception occurrences (e.g., DePaulo and Kashy, 1998; Weiss and Feldman, 2006) lend credibility to such a conclusion
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